Industries
Education
Proper visibility, monitoring, and security of the network is paramount to fostering a positive learning experience.
Higher education
IT teams in higher education are tasked with supporting a unique computer and networking environment. Unlike businesses that work hard to secure and restrict access, higher education must provide a completely open environment to encourage research and foster learning. Within this environment of open trust, visibility, monitoring, and user accountability are essential.
K-12
Access to technology outside of the classroom has forever changed the lives of students. Engaging students inside the classroom requires integrating rich media into the curriculum. This shift places new burdens on IT staff and the infrastructure they support. Monitoring, visualizing, and securing this environment is foundational to delivering a positive and safe learning experience.
Plixer benefits
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Foster better learning
Online resources and rich media are an integral part of modern curriculum. Professors and teachers leverage digital resources to educate students and expand their horizons. A positive learning experience requires IT to have increased visibility, improved security, and the ability to optimize the infrastructure to support students’ digital experience.
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Student accountability
When students are entrusted with access to technology, it’s important to monitor their activity and, if they break that trust, hold them accountable. Accomplishing this requires both primary and higher education institutions to visualize, store, and report on every conversation associated with a specific student.
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Resource optimization
The performance of voice, video, and other rich educational media relies heavily upon the network. IT requires the ability to visualize every conversation, understand the applications involved, and quantify their performance. With this visibility and knowledge, IT can ensure the infrastructure is optimized to support a positive learning experience.
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Catching security breaches
School districts and universities face the same security risks and concerns as enterprise organizations, yet in most cases have fewer resources to protect and monitor their environments. Plixer’s proactive monitoring and advanced security analytics offer schools the next-generation risk reduction and historical data they need.
Case studies
Primary education
Schools are required to be compliant with the Children’s Internet Protection Act (CIPA). This involves an internet policy that addresses cyber safety concerns, including:
- Access by minors to inappropriate content on the internet
- Unauthorized access, hacking, or other unlawful activities by minors online
- Unauthorized disclosure, use, and dissemination of personal information regarding minors
Plixer has helped school districts large and small satisfy their CIPA compliance needs. Plixer’s Scrutinizer extends visibility into all hosts and applications communicating on the network—including traffic to malicious sources—and makes gathering details on these conversations elementary. Scrutinizer also provides access to at-a-glance views of the entire network, which allows for quickly spotting slowdowns and easily drilling down to find out the reasons behind them.
West Aurora School District 129
West Aurora, a large school district in one of Chicago’s suburbs, needed better visibility and context to quickly identify root cause for an ongoing DDoS attack. In addition, they wanted a solution to verify CIPA compliance for better student safety and optimize network performance to deliver a 21st-century learning experience.
Kingsway College School
Higher education
One big concern of colleges and universities is the ability to verify copyright allegations made by the RIAA and the MPAA. To avoid taking the brunt of the lawsuit, schools must be able to track down the offender or demonstrate that a student was falsely accused.
By providing insight into the entire network, Scrutinizer can pick out BitTorrent traffic among the flows from tens of thousands of conversations. It can store this data for decades, so going back in time to find the needed data is easy, even when you need to drill down to the exact minute.
SUNY Geneseo College
Part of the State University of New York system, SUNY Geneseo is a premier public liberal arts college that educates 5,000 undergraduates. SUNY Geneseo leverages Scrutinizer to monitor network behavior during RIAA crackdowns and beyond.
Our products
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Scrutinizer
Scrutinizer, Plixer’s network traffic analysis system, collects, analyzes, visualizes, and reports on data from every network conversation and digital transaction to deliver security and network intelligence. It provides the insight and historical data needed to manage and optimize business operations while reducing risk by detecting and remediating incidents.
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FlowPro
FlowPro probes support application performance management as well as defender capabilities for monitoring DNS traffic. From a single probe, network operations can efficiently manage and optimize the network, while security operations is able to simultaneously lower risk, gain data context, and respond quickly to security incidents.
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Replicator
Replicator aggregates, replicates, and distributes flow and log metadata exported from the existing network across multiple monitoring tools like SIEM, syslog and flow collectors. This improves the value of the data while dramatically simplifying adds, moves, and changes and protecting the CPU of exporting switches, routers, firewalls, etc.
